According to a recent investigation by data website Five Thirty Eight, the two most frequently played Christmas songs on North American radio are “Sleigh Ride” and “Winter Wonderland,” a pair of chipper, decades-old tunes about mucking about in frigid wastelands. This is at least a little surprising, considering neither is expressly about Christmas, per se. So what it is it about these seasonal, ahem, treats, that so appeals to programmers? The Post’s David Berry dragged a team of carolers singing them incessantly through the snow-covered fields of Southwestern Ontario to find out.

It is time, once again, to celebrate the holidays with our friends and loved ones. And co-workers.

Please don’t forget the co-workers.

It’s not enough to spend five days a week with your dear colleagues; you must put in a few extra off-hours of chit-chat and merrymaking for good show. Of course, the office holiday party is always fun and festive. Except when it’s awkward and uncomfortable.

But above all, it’s obligatory.

Skip it and you’re a Grinch or a Scrooge or some kind of weird hermit who doesn’t exist outside the workplace. Besides, this party is for you. To thank you for all your hard work and dedication throughout the past 12 months. They’re not giving out bonuses this year, but here, these mini cheese tarts and rock-hard sugar cookies should make you feel better about your underemployment.

This is the double bind of the office holiday party: It’s a party, so it’s supposed to be fun, but it’s a party populated by people who hold sway over your annual review, so how much fun can you really have?

“You’re having an enforced social occasion. You don’t necessarily want to be there, but there is something about it that you feel like you should enjoy it — and you should be there,” says Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. “Because sociability is important for work life.”

Which means that you have to show up and make nice and present yourself to be a well-rounded individual with at least a few social graces. Or else miss out on the chance to impress your boss’s boss with your stylish party wear and witty banter.

Not that it’s all bad. When else would you get to meet, in person, the spouse your cube-mate fights with on the phone every afternoon? Or watch as your colleague’s demon child steals food off other people’s plates? It’s informative, if nothing else.

“Oh, they always get awkward,” says Jo Rhodes, who works for a British defence contractor and was visiting Washington last week. “Having had a drink — people don’t have any inhibitions. You go out with work friends and start talking about things you wouldn’t normally talk about with them — all your worldly troubles.”

Hence that other annual tradition: the office holiday party hangover. Gawd, why did I say that? Did I really have to dance that way in front of him? Why don’t I remember how I got home?

A.T., an education policy professional who works in D.C. and asked to be identified only by her initials so that she won’t get fired, said that the legend around her office is that a woman once got so drunk at the holiday party, she stripped naked and ran through the fountains in the building atrium. “Now there are no more drinks allowed on-site,” says A.T.

A 2010 poll by human resources consulting firm Adecco found that 40% of American workers had either done something inappropriate at a work holiday party or knew someone who had. An additional 20% admitted to having had too much to drink at such a soiree.

‘Alcohol and men and women working together in close quarters is always a problem’

Saval says that office parties were notorious bastions of bad behaviour in the 1950s. “It became legendarily a scene where debauchery took place — people slept with the wrong people,” he says. “Where everyone gets trashed and makes out with each other. There was a sense that the male prerogatives of the office could be exercised with greater looseness.”

And though the Mad Men era is over, the licentiousness is not. At least not everywhere.

Alan Lescht, a Washington employment lawyer, can usually count on getting a call or two this time of year to deal with tricky post-party situations.

“Alcohol and men and women working together in close quarters is always a problem,” Lescht says. “Then they call us or come in and more likely than not it’s a woman [making the complaint]. A man has had too much to drink and a supervisor has done something they shouldn’t. People just tend to get out of hand. There’s always going to be someone who drinks too much.”

It’s Lescht’s job to help clean up the mess and make things right with the employee — whether that means an apology, a transfer or more severe remedial action. Because, he says, “the reality is that it’s hard for someone to go back to work after everyone has seen some crazy situation that they’re all talking about.”

A.B., a former student who also asked to go by his initials, said that his worst moment came at an undergraduate department party at his old college. Everything was fine until a favourite professor — who was married with kids, but known to be having an affair — brought his mistress to the party.

“Everyone felt extremely uncomfortable, awkward and a little violated,” he says. “Everyone was just looking at each other going, ‘This is so weird.’ ”

‘Literally nothing is more awkward than someone who’s three weeks sober’

Usually it’s too much alcohol that causes strained moments, but occasionally it’s the lack thereof. Christina Tkacik, a journalist who now lives in Beirut, says that her most awkward holiday party happened in Washington. And that she was the source of the awkwardness. She had recently stopped drinking and shared her news with everyone she spoke to.

“I should add,” she wrote in an email, “that literally nothing is more awkward than someone who’s three weeks sober. You might as well be a newborn horse fresh out of its mama’s womb trying to simultaneously learn to walk and go shopping at Bloomingdale’s.”

That night one colleague taught her a lesson in “how to tell when someone is no longer interested in having a conversation with you,” she says. “You can tell by their body language — their feet slowly start to shift in the other direction.”

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Clay Barron of Woodbridge, Virginia, works for a government contractor that rents out a boat for a holiday sail along the Potomac every year. There’s always good food and an open bar and a white elephant gift exchange. Because the firm’s employees work at different locations, this is often one of the few times of the year that they’re all together.

“So there’s usually a lot of reminiscing about last year,” says Barron, 35. People especially love to talk about the time one employee’s hair caught fire. “She got too close to a candle on the buffet table,” he explains.

It happens.

There’s usually something like that. Something that gives people fodder for next-day gossip.

“It’s always interesting,” says Jouli Mac, a 27-year-old Alexandria, Virginia, woman who works for a small business. “When alcohol is involved, you see different sides of people. It’s very — uh — merry.”

She won’t get into specifics. She’d like to keep her job. But she will say that it takes a long time to live these things down.

The ontology of Santa Claus didn’t impinge on my life until my son, Ari, was in kindergarten. Ari did not believe in Santa Claus. He was supposed to go to the zoo in early December with his friend Schuyler, and Schuyler’s mother, Tammi, called me up and said she didn’t want her son to go because there were reindeer there, and reindeer, she felt, would lead to a discussion of Santa Claus. Tammi’s son, Schuyler, did believe in Santa Claus: He was still firmly a sweet child and not yet in sour and rebellious teenager territory, and she wanted him, at least for a while, to stay that way. So Tammi wanted to cancel the playdate to ensure that Ari would not tell her son, “There is no Santa — he’s just your parents,” and shake his belief.

I found this a troubling interaction because I thought Tammi was sacrificing her son’s friendship with Ari, who was real, in order to preserve his relationship with Santa Claus, who was not.

Why was I so sure he didn’t exist? Not because I’ve never seen him — I’ve never seen Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli and she exists, or at least did as of this writing. And not because if I went to the North Pole, I wouldn’t see him and his elves — just a lot of snow and ice and so forth — because there are any number of explanations that would square with that. Santa might emit a field from his beard that makes people miss him, the elves might have a machine that causes light to bend, or I could have met him and then been convinced by Mrs. Claus to undergo brain surgery that erased my memory. No, the real reason, I’m sure, is that nobody had ever told me he did, and belief in Santa Claus did not fit in with a number of other things I knew to be true — e.g., reindeer don’t fly, toys come from the store, etc.

I told this story to my daughter and she said, “I believe in Santa Claus.” I also asked her if she believed in the Easter bunny and she said, “Yes. I’m a kid, so I believe in everything.”

I told this story to my wife, who is a psychologist raised in Communist Romania, and she said something along the lines of, “American parents lie to their children about this stupidity, and then the children grow up and find out their parents lied to them. No wonder American children are screwed up.”

I remained puzzled by Tammi’s behaviour. I could think of two possible solutions:

The Liar Explanation

For some reason back in the past, American children were taught to believe in Santa Claus — probably because their parents thought it was a good way to scare them into being good. When the children grew up and stopped believing in Santa Claus, they decided it would be a good idea to trick their children into believing. So society is basically divided into two groups of people — the liars and the lied to. The liars have motivations ranging from the benevolent (parents presumably) to the self-interested (the sellers of Christmas merchandise, American politicians who want a national myth that will unite a nation of immigrants). Let’s be blunt and call this the LIAR story.

How can one person believe and not believe in Santa Claus?

I’ve observed evidence that the LIAR story is true. I work in Hollywood, which pumps a lot of images and stories out into the consciousness of the globe. When we were writing an episode of a television show called The Big Bang Theory, in which the character Sheldon kills Santa Claus in a Dungeons and Dragons game, one of the writers wanted to be sure that our story left the existence of Santa Claus open, because his kids were going to watch the show and they believed in Santa Claus. Of course, since he was a writer for a U.S. sitcom that is supported by commercials, his benevolent motivations for lying meshed with the less benevolent motivators of our advertisers.

The Crazy Explanation

Another solution to the puzzle was that something in Tammi’s mind is divided or dissociated. So, according to this theory, it’s possible that a part of Tammi’s mind does believe in Santa Claus. She doesn’t talk about it when she talks to other adults, but when alone with her child, she believes. The part of Tammi that believes in Santa might not even be a part that has access to her mouth. So she might never say, “I believe in Santa Claus,” but she is disposed to have dreams, fantasies, and feelings related to Saint Nick. As a consequence, she is uncomfortable with having her son lose faith in Santa Claus because some system in her brain believes, too.

How can one person believe and not believe in Santa Claus? If you are a strong proponent of the conspiracy story, you may not believe this is the case — you might think that if she ever does confess to Santa belief, she is just lying. After all, she buys toys at the store — how can she honestly maintain they come down the chimney? But people believe different things at different times and in different contexts. Let’s imagine Tammi goes home and goes to bed. As she drifts off to sleep, she hears a voice in her head, one that sounds like her own. It says, “Santa does exist. I remember waiting for him to come. How do I know he didn’t? Yes, part of me thinks he didn’t come and never will, but why should I listen to that part?”

Tammi has a couple of different Tammis inside her. She has the Tammi who once believed in Santa but now buys toys from the store, and she has the Tammi who still does believe in Santa. This Tammi feels good when she thinks about Santa and angry when she thinks about Eric not believing in Santa. This Tammi can effortlessly respond to Santa images and Santa television shows and songs about Santa.

Tammi’s self could be divided; she could be more than one of her Tammis at the same time — that is, she could have one voice in her head that says, “Of course Santa Claus does not exist,” and another voice that says, “I hope he brings me something good!” Or her self could be divided across time. That is, she could make fun of Santa Claus all year long until Christmas season and then talk during Christmas as if she does believe in the jolly old saint. Since it invokes voices in the head, let us call this, uncharitably, the CRAZY explanation.

You can say that Tammi is lying to herself — or that America is a little crazy on the subject of Santa Claus

The LIAR and the CRAZY explanations are similar on a deep level because while LIAR appeals to dissociation on the interpersonal level, CRAZY appeals to dissociation on the intrapersonal level. Societies run by conspiracies built on lies are schizophrenic; crazy people lie to themselves.

In the CRAZY explanation, there is some kind of disunity within Tammi — there is a part of her that believes and a part that doesn’t believe. In the LIAR explanation, there is a dis- unity in America — there is part that believes and part that doesn’t believe. And in both, there is something sort of screwed up about the relationship among these parts. You can even switch the explanations. You can say that Tammi is lying to herself — or that America is a little crazy on the subject of Santa Claus.

If you haven’t yet started thinking about how you’ll decorate your home for the festive season, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or beyond, it’s time to do so!

We reached out to Pottery Barn and chatted with their resident expert, Kendra Stewart, about what’s lining your local design store’s shelves this season. We also nabbed a few of her tips on how to incorporate holiday items into your home’s year-round decor.

REUTERS/Matthew Sherwood VIA Rail Chief of Operations John Marginson speaks to the media about a passenger train that derailed in Burlington, Ont., Sunday.

What are some of the trends people can expect to see in store?

In addition to the familiar symbols of the season, a big trend this year is infusing your decor with inspiration straight from nature for an enchanted forest take on the holiday such as birch bark, pine cones and feathers.

Tyler Anderson/National Post

Another big trend is to blend cozy style with luxe accents – think faux fur and chunky knits with accents of mercury glass and sparkly beading. We [at Pottery Barn] have also drawn on designs from around the world.

What are the biggest colour schemes for the season?

Shades of red and green are a classic during the holiday season, but a colour scheme of white, soft grey and metallic silver and gold makes for a chic take on holiday decor.

Are there any new trends that we haven’t seen before?

Entertaining is such a huge part of the holiday season so barware and serveware pieces [are becoming just] as important as one’s decor. A good example is our new City Barware entertaining collection; [it’s] inspired by urban architecture… [It will] make any table setup feel worldly and chic.

REUTERS/J.P. MoczulskiEmergency personnel attend to a VIA passenger train that derailed in Burlington Ont., Sunday. Three Via employees were killed in the crash. “It’s very tragic for us,” said Via spokeswoman Michelle Lamarche.

What are some ways people can incorporate these holiday items into their existing decor?

A quick change of pillows is an easy way to decorate for the holidays. Adding a cozy knit or sentiment pillow to what you already have on your sofa will instantly update your decor and help create an inviting holiday setting.

Will any of these holiday trends sustain themselves into the spring?

Decor inspired by natural elements will be usable well beyond the holidays. Repurpose the gold and metallic decor, like the gold chargers and jewelled server sets, to add a bit of sparkle to a dinner party any time of the year.

If you think the holiday season is unavoidable, think again: Steve Murray has a simple, rhyming guide to getting the most out of this time of year, with the least festivities possible.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/life/how-to-hate-the-holidays-steve-murrays-illustrated-guide-to-honing-ones-inner-humbug-2/feed0gallerybook1Top 15 toys for the holiday season led by Angry Birds, Elmo, LEGO, as Canadians gear up to spend about the same as last year on giftshttp://news.nationalpost.com/life/top-15-toys-for-the-holiday-season-led-by-angry-birds-elmo-as-canadians-gear-up-to-spend-about-the-same-as-last-year-on-gifts
http://news.nationalpost.com/life/top-15-toys-for-the-holiday-season-led-by-angry-birds-elmo-as-canadians-gear-up-to-spend-about-the-same-as-last-year-on-gifts#commentsTue, 05 Nov 2013 20:01:44 +0000http://life.nationalpost.com/?p=125818

Walking into a Canadian retailer this time of year feels exactly like being swallowed by a Christmas parade float — all garland tongues, gingerbread breath and tinsel tonsils. But are shoppers buying what stores are selling?

Unless they’re inside a travel agency, the answer appears to be a firm “meh.”

According to BMO’s 2013 Holiday Spending Outlook, to be released Wednesday, gift purchases in Canada will be relatively flat this season, rising a scant 0.6% over last year to reach $678. Instead, Canadians are allocating a larger share of money to getaways, which are forecast to rise 22% over 2012, and nearly double what was spent in 2011: $689 versus $360.

“We’re seeing different ways of giving,” said Laura Parsons, a BMO personal finance expert. “There’s a switch to going on trips as a family, instead of doing gifts.”

Overall, seasonal spending is projected to be up for the third Christmas in a row, rising to $1,810 from $1,610 in 2012 and $1,397 in 2011. But Parsons cautions that money is being distributed differently than in the past.
Across the country, consumers are wising up to deals, with the expected use of loyalty rewards for holiday purchases up 32% over 2012. People are increasing their family travel allowance instead of putting more money toward traditional gifts.

And in terms of setting a fixed budget, the share of Canadians professing to do so is up seven points, to 36%.

“There are a lot more thrifty buyers who are really doing their homework before they spend,” said Parsons, who is based in Calgary. “You do not want that Christmas aftermath that carries through to the summer months.”

But Grinches we are not, with most Canadians getting into the spirit in one way or another. Starbucks alone, for example, is expected to sell enough holiday drinks — think peppermint mochas and eggnog lattes — to ice more than 812 curling sheets.

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Parsons said the take-home message, simply, is that shoppers aren’t going to go crazy.

Independent surveys for Deloitte and Ernst & Young arrived at similar conclusions, with each forecasting a conservative Christmas spend (modest year-over-year increases of 2% to 3.5%), while a third survey for Google Canada predicted a drop in the average gift budget, from $711 to $629.

The BMO report is based on a Pollara survey of 1,215 randomly sampled adult Canadians, conducted between Oct. 11 and 16. Results are considered accurate within 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

NEW YORK — Two holiday seasons ago, the National Post started the debate: When you attend a party during the months of November and December, when the possibility of slush and winter dirt increase, should you leave your footwear at the door, or step over the threshold still shod? We debated it ourselves, and got party experts to debate it, and guess what? The debate is still raging this year, even south of the border and beyond.

In Michigan, you’re expected to leave snowy boots in the mudroom before going inside. In Alaska, boots are taken off in “Arctic entries.” In Japan, Thailand and many other countries, you wouldn’t dream of entering a home with your shoes on, regardless of the season.

But removing shoes before coming inside has not been the norm in much of the U.S.

‘I just pray I have a fresh pedicure!’

These days, however, city dwellers and suburbanites from New York to Los Angeles often find that hosts expect footwear to be left at the door. Sometimes it’s because of weather; other times, homeowners want to protect light-coloured rugs and high-gloss wood floors from dirt and dings, or parents don’t want street germs on floors where kids play.

“But this is an outfit!” squeals Carrie Bradshaw in a Sex and the City episode when asked to take her shoes off at a baby shower. (Insult to injury: Her high-heeled Manolos are stolen during the party.)

Shalena Broaster of Philadelphia — whose friends call her “the diva” — says her first thought when asked to remove shoes is: “I just pray I have a fresh pedicure!” Since she’s only five feet tall, she also misses the height her stilettos provide.

Classy hosts with a no-shoes rule hand out “guest socks” or inexpensive slippers that folks can take home. But please don’t offer Broaster your old tube socks. “Nasty!” she said.

Rachel Kerstetter of Cleveland wrote on her blog that guests sometimes make her feel “like a criminal” for asking them to remove shoes. She offered 10 reasons why her household is “shoes-free,” including preserving the carpet, allowing guests to relax and put their feet up, and keeping allergens out of the house along with “grass, leaves, mud, dirt, bugs, gum, oil, tar and yes, even animal poo.”

For everyday comings and goings, Kerstetter and her husband use a mudroom by the back door. For company, they put a shoe rack in a small foyer near the front door.

Handout/APAsking people to take off their expensive footwear when they enter your house? The least you need to do is provide a place to sit and do it, and a rack to keep shoes in order while they visit.

“We like to walk around barefoot and we want to have our home clean,” Kerstetter said. She “didn’t grow up in a no-shoes household, but my parents taught me to ask” the host’s preference before entering.

Another must for shoes-off parties: Put a chair by the door. Don’t make guests hop unbalanced on one shoe while taking off the other. And put out a shoe rack so footwear doesn’t end up in a pile.

Adi Bittan planned her wedding at the home of friends in Pescadero, Calif., before realizing that the hosts had a no-shoes rule. “We were worried how that would look and whether our guests would feel uncomfortable or embarrassed,” she said. She solved the problem by buying fun socks — with no-skid soles — as one of the wedding favours. Even she and the groom wore them.

“Guests young and old ended up loving it,” she said. “They compared colours, took photos with their fun socks on and were excited to take them home.” Some of the women even thanked her for saving them from excruciating high heels.

‘It is the height of tacky to invite guests to your home and then require that they remove anything’

But the pro-shoes crowd doesn’t buy the no-shoes reasoning. If you’re worried about wood floors, they say, invest in inexpensive rugs. Protecting a white carpet? Roll it up. Tracked-in dirt? Mop or vacuum.

“It is the height of tacky to invite guests to your home and then require that they remove anything more than outdoor attire,” said Jodi R.R. Smith of Mannersmith Etiquette Consulting in Marblehead, Mass. “It is one thing to ask me to leave my L.L. Bean boots at the door for a Super Bowl party held during a snowstorm in New England. It is another to ask me to remove my heels at a cocktail party where everyone is dressed in suits and dresses.”

If you must ban shoes, says Smith, the invitation should say so. “Guests should not be surprised by your request,” she said. Imagine the mortification of a guest whose socks have holes.

Jessica Gottlieb of Los Angeles says she is “disgusted when people want me to take my shoes off in their home. … OK, I get it for upstairs areas or bedrooms or even if you’re Japanese. But if you’re my American friend who just wants a clean floor, forget about it. It’s a power play and no, you don’t get to undress me.

December – and too often November and even October – have become the time of year in which the chronically offended enjoy one of their richest seasons of things to complain about.

It’s the season in which depictions of mangers are denounced as some sort of religious conspiracy designed to brainwash unsuspecting passers-by into seeking out the nearest church, where they can immediately convert. In which fir trees, decorated with tinsel and shiny little balls, take on new meaning as intrusions on the rights and liberties of the anti-fir tree community. In which the singing of certain songs (known as “carols”) and the recitation of certain popular verses (“Twas the night before Christmas…” ) send easily-offended parents heading to the nearest school superintendent or human rights tribunal to register their objections.

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Atheists and the grumpy hate this season. Every year, year after year, it demonstrates once again that the world simply refuses to erase its memory of any hint of “so-called Jesus” and his “so-called birth”. It doesn’t seem to matter that the “Christmas season” has long since been usurped by “the holiday season,” that there’s about as much religion involved in Christmas as there is at a WalMart Black Friday sale, or that a present or two under a tree has been replaced by eight weeks of intensive mass marketing designed to fill consumers with guilt if they fail to supply appropriate gifts to anyone who might feel they have a call on one.

No, something about Christmas still rankles with people who seem to need something to object to as the date approaches. And for too long, figures of authority have conceded ground rather than risk a confrontation or messy public dispute. If one parent insists little Billy or Suzy shouldn’t have to endure being exposed to a Christmas pageant, the whole school does without a Christmas pageant. If some supervisor decides a jar of candy canes might be too threatening to healthy office relations, out they go. It has become customary to assume that it’s better an entire community be denied harmless pleasures rather than risk offending a single individual.

Or, perhaps, not entirely. In an encouraging sign, Treasury Board President Tony Clement has issued a directive to federal public employees indicating that the display of Christmas ornamentation is entirely acceptable and not subject to punishment. “Our Government will not allow the Christmas spirit to be grinched,” said Clement in a press release issued on Sunday. “Christmas and Hanukkah are special times of the year that Canadians look forward to. The lights and decorations lift the spirit and instill the season with a sense of wonder and celebration.”

The memo results from a flap last year when the head of Service Canada in Quebec ordered employees in 118 offices to dispense with any decorations in public areas, a directive that was later countermanded from Ottawa. The federal government wants to ensure nothing similar happens this year.

It may be just a small blow against political correctness, but it’s a welcome one. If Canada’s federal civil servants can endure tinsel, candy canes and other decorative items for a few weeks in December and survive, perhaps there’s still hope for the rest of us.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/tony-clement-de-grinches-the-halls-of-power/feed0stdFestive tie-wearing Treasury Board President Tony Clement responds to a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, Dec.4, 2012.Kelly McParland: Pope's book provides an excuse to delink Christ from Dec. 25http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/kelly-mcparland-popes-book-provides-an-excuse-to-delink-christ-from-dec-25
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/kelly-mcparland-popes-book-provides-an-excuse-to-delink-christ-from-dec-25#commentsThu, 22 Nov 2012 17:23:22 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=98323

Pope Benedict XVI has opened the way to an historic opportunity that might benefit much of humankind and save the rest of us from enduring another eight weeks of seasonal disorder syndrome, an affliction that starts with the first October Christmas carol and which I believe is more widespread than people want to admit.

The Pope has published the third in a trilogy of works dealing with the life of Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives completes a project the 85-year-old Pope took up after being elected pontiff in 2005. The first two books were big sellers in Italy (and presumably among Catholics elsewhere as well). The latest volume reportedly has an initial printing of one milllion, and hit bookshelves around the world on Wednesday.

The headline issue is the Pope’s acknowledgement that Jesus wasn’t born in the year everyone thinks he was. I’m not sure this is really news; as a certified non-pious Canadian who gets sleepy just thinking about entering a church, I thought it was generally known that historians had long ago sorted out that the dates were off by a few years. Nonetheless, it’s viewed as significant that the Pope would actually say so in print. According to the book, a monk known as Dionysius Exiguus (which translates as Dennis the Small) got the dates wrong when he set out to invent a new calendar about 1500 years ago.

“The calculation of the beginning of our calendar – based on the birth of Jesus – was made by Dionysius Exiguus, who made a mistake in his calculations by several years,” the Pope says. “The actual date of Jesus’s birth was several years before.”

The Pope maintains Jesus was born in a stable, as commonly assumed, though there might not have been donkeys, camels, oxen or other critters present. “There is no mention of animals in the Gospels,” he writes. And he insists Mary was a virgin. But it wasn’t on Dec. 25, a date that was adopted later, perhaps linked to some rituals related to the winter solstice.

Apart from whatever religious significance this may involve, it offers the Church an opportunity to isolate its annual celebration of Jesus’ birth from the overdone commercial orgy that’s known as Christmas. Pick another date — one the Vatican thinks might be more historically accurate, or at least no less inaccurate — and move the religious celebration accordingly, while leaving Dec. 25 to the crass materialists. Not that the orgy would stop, but it would no longer inspire the tedious annual eruptions of complaint from underoccupied cranks, atheists and misguided zealots upset that trees should appear in schools, mangers should turn up on lawns and other insults to strict secularism should be induced on the unwilling. People could give one another gifts without someone complaining about it. The prayers that are an offence to the ears of determined non-prayers could be moved to another day of the year, when they could be delivered by consenting adults outside the hearing of the temporally fixated. Dec. 25 would be just another holiday that no one could beef about (unless they just don’t like holidays), while Christmas in March (or whenever) would simply be a religious symbol marked by those who choose to, without bothering those who don’t, and free of the annoyance and excess of the annual two-month build-up.

And who knows, once it was just another long weekend, maybe some of the excess would diminish. Which I suspect would be a welcome change to a lot of people.